Frank commentary from an unretired call girl

The Story Behind the Story

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself any direction you choose.
You’re on your own. And you know what you know.
And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go. – Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

I’m sure most of you recognized yesterday’s column as a tribute to Dr. Seuss’ first published work, And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street; you may even have recognized that it’s a line-by-line parody, and that I retained the good Doctor’s own words wherever I could. But it just wouldn’t have been half as good without the Seussian illustrations; they were kindly provided by Ricardo Cortés, illustrator of the bestselling Go the Fuck to Sleep (and now that y’all know he’s a fellow reader, I’m sure some of y’all may be even more interested in some of the other books he’s illustrated). Anyhow, Ricardo had a few questions about my parody and since I’m sure some of you have similar ones, I figured I’d share my answer.

…I’m curious about the context of the piece, and why April Fools? It’s clearly a response to the all-sex-workers-are-slaves narrative. Is it directed to a particular event or charge? Obviously any Save-Them-All campaign is limited and patronizing. On the other hand, there certainly are prostitutes who are exploited and trafficked, etc., no?…perhaps you can direct me to some writing you’ve already made about this question…I’m curious as to how you address the other side of the equation (when sex workers are actually exploited by organized crime, etc.)

I wanted to do it on April Fool’s Day just because it’s kind of silly; I’ve never done a full-blown parody before so that seemed like a good day for it. Though it is in part a response to the “enslaved whore” narrative, it’s even more a sharp criticism of the neofeminist practice of “re-framing experiences”. Unhappy ex-hookers who are recruited by anti-whore organizations are encouraged to “re-frame their experiences”, which means make up things that didn’t happen so as to “sell” the public, media and politicians more strongly on the “evils of prostitution”. Women who resist lying in this way are chastised, browbeaten and (if they persist) kicked out of the “movement”, while those who play along are praised and rewarded with money and attention. An example of a reject is Jill Brenneman (who discussed the matter in her interview on this blog two years ago); an example of a perfect shill is Stella Marr, about whom I’ve written on several occasions. The most striking example of “reframing” I’ve written about so far is the story of Long Pros, whom celebrity prohibitionist Somaly Mam used to advance her crusade: Pros was a Cambodian girl from a poor family who never did any sex work in her life, but lost an eye to a tumor; under Mam’s coaching she invented the lurid story that she was a “sex trafficking” victim who had been enslaved in a brothel and had her eye gouged out by a brutal pimp.

The really creepy part of the whole thing is that the longer the “survivor” stays in the movement, the more her stories start to converge with those of others; she internalizes the preferred narratives, and they form a pattern in much the same way that any mythology begins to form a whole. In the early ‘80s, the preferred feminist “survivor” narrative was that the “victim” had been abused by her father, uncle or other male relative; in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s it was that her abusers were part of a Satanic cult, and by the late ‘90s they had morphed into “sex traffickers” driven by profit. By the early ‘20s it will change again, but of course we have no way to predict what that change will involve. It’s fascinating from a psycho-sociological perspective, but extremely dangerous because the courts have abandoned the necessity for proper evidence and the presumption of innocence, so that even the most outlandish “eyewitness” testimony is taken seriously.

As for “organized crime”, that doesn’t really mean what the tale-spinners want you to believe; in criminology, “organized crime” just means any group (which could be as few as 3 or 4 people) who plan to carry out illegal activity together. My escort service would be classified as “organized crime” because we “conspired” to “commit prostitution”. The same goes for so-called “human traffickers”; two guys in Nigeria with a friend in Denmark and a border guard who is paid to ignore them sneaking willing immigrants into the country, make up an “international human trafficking ring” if the women work as maids, and an “international sex slavery ring” if one or more of them works as a hooker. It’s not about enormous criminal cartels smuggling thousands of crying women in cages as the propaganda wants you to believe. The best book for putting this all in perspective is Laura Agustín’s Sex at the Margins; Agustín has been studying migration and sex work for twenty years and will open your eyes to the truth of all this. But for the most part, so-called “sex trafficking victims” are really just women going from a relatively poor country to a relatively wealthy one to do sex work, sometimes breaking the rules of the destination country in the process; anyone who helps her is therefore a “criminal” and a “trafficker”, even if the “victim” entered into the arrangement willingly and is as satisfied as any conventional worker with the terms of her employment.

9 Responses

As for “organized crime”, that doesn’t really mean what the tale-spinners want you to believe; in criminology, “organized crime” just means any group (which could be as few as 3 or 4 people) who plan to carry out illegal activity together.

The feds are seeking to expand racketeering to cover just about anything. It’s rapidly becoming — like conspiracy — a charge to throw on top of whatever else you can find to charge someone with. It’s a meaningless phrase that mostly serves to extend prison sentences.

I wonder how many “organized crime” activities I belong to? Or how many I could stomach belonging to under the right circumstances? I’m starting to get “numb” to the term – “organized crime” doesn’t set off the same alarms of revulsion to me that it once did – the term has been diluted so much.

Seriously though – I am so pessimistic about the future of Western Civilization that I often wonder what I will do for a “livelihood” when my wonderful little life crashes and burns with everyone else’s?

I can contrast it with that of a young lady I know who was convicted of assault on a police officer during her freshman year at college (an automatic felony) and sent off to prison for a short stay.

When she got out, she found out that she no longer needed to aspire to any “straight” job more challenging than working at McDonald’s or Wal*Mart (and no guarantee even those jobs would hire someone with her record). So, being intelligent and gorgeous, she became a call girl.

You asked me to email you today. I tried, using one of the links over on the right, but it wouldn’t let me send it. It wanted to know some sort of code for my email address, but I have no idea what the correct one is and I couldn’t find the information when I looked up my email account.

Maggie, just discovered your blog (blame or thank Popehat if you want), and I love how you link back to everything! I went to read today’s post, started following links, and lost a couple hours of my life. 😀

I’ve always wondered about the prohibitionists, something just didn’t ring true, not to mention my suspicion of organized religion. Nice to see the other side of it.

Of course, some of the suspicion of the ‘party line’ was brought on by knowing a girl in college (1987-1991) who was a stripper/sometimes escort on weekends, college student by day, and shared for free on some weeknights what she got good money for on the weekends. She didn’t seem very exploited to me, and she always liked me, she said, because I didn’t judge or try to blackmail her with anything.

I was taking 18 credit hours or more most semesters, so I didn’t have time to shower presents and attention on a ‘typical’ girlfriend. She made her money on weekends in a city 50 miles away, so I ran interference for her on campus by being the public ‘boyfriend’ and in return she took care of me, although that arrangement sort of came about by accident. It started as a friendship, and then benefits were offered and accepted, I guess. She actually noted that it worked out rather neatly for her. I’ve never been sure how much of it she engineered, but I was 18-20 and not complaining about regular sex and a warm girl in my bed three to four nights a week. She graduated before me, and went on her way into life. I still get a card from her on my birthday and at Christmas for the last twenty-plus years. Doesn’t seem unhappy to me. 😛

Many people do not have a firm grip on reality. This gets exploited in a number of ways. One example is that the “Nigerian money scam” is still around and has only seen slow refinement: It still works after all these years and despite being really obvious. Another symptom is that many people are open to suggestions to the degree of creating false memories. Now, I believe these people actually need to be regarded as somehow “not having grown up”. That makes those going for these weak spots utter scum. It is even worse when people create memories of abuse in their victims, because in a very real sense they are not only abusing them sexually, they also abuse those that then get blamed for something they never did.

But the real problem I see is that we have this collective fantasy that basically everybody does have a firm grip of reality. Not that I advocate removing the rights of people that do not (that would be horrible and horribly easy to abuse), but I advocate that we should teach everybody, possibly in school, that memories are to be taken with caution and are more in the nature of hints of what might have happened in the past and are open to misinterpretation by the person having them. That way, people would have a better chance recognizing when they are manipulated and would start really looking for evidence either way, instead of just believing they remember what actually did happen. That should also curb the countless instances of induced sexual trauma by inducing memories of sexual abuse.

The scientific state of the matter seems to be that memories are basically rough, fuzzy transcripts of the past that get reconstructed when we remember things. Unfortunately, the reconstructed version then mixes with the older memory. You can notice this yourself, when you take out an old memory that you can verify time and again. It can become more and more gray and lifeless, or it becomes more and more colorful. And when you take out the evidence and compare (picture, recording, etc.), you will notice significant discrepancies.

This is also how these indirect abusers work: They make their victims recall the memories time and again, each time manipulating the reconstruction process a bit, unless the memory is something else entirely. On the moral side, I thing that somebody that induces a memory of rape and abuse should be treated no different from somebody that rapes and abuses, as the memories will be quite real to those affected and recovery is about as difficult and painful.

Which brings me to an interesting idea: Maybe some of these people inducing these false memories are actually sadists that secretly enjoy seeing their victims suffer? That would explain the incredible persistence they show.

I think that this is almost certainly true in some cases. It is, in effect, a way to rape somebody and not only get away with it, but get paid for it.

And some are doing it, not for the thrill, but for the money. It is amazing the way so many of us can heap moral indignation on whores for “selling themselves” but we seem to be OK with these people who are selling out another person’s childhood.

Finally, I think that some of these folk truly believe that anybody showing certain signs (anxiety at family gatherings or whatever) must have been sexually abused, and think that the memories they pull out of their patients are real. They think that they are doing something good, and they believe the false memory as much as the patient does because, hey, this is exactly what they knew had happened all along.

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